2009 NASCAR Fantasy Championship: Entries & Driver Changes

[Antrodemus]

Now entering the 3rd year of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Fantasy Series, we are hoping for a great season ahead, Penguin Motorsport won last years championship and I'm sure will be looking to defend it's title.




Presented by.....




For those who haven't been a part of something like this before, it's fairly simple, You have a team, and a budget, and make the team of your choice, providing you don't go over budget. You can have a PR person to issue press statements, make liveries make car numbers, sponsers, whatever, it's all good fun.

Unfortunately due to our late start this year, we will have to miss Daytona and Fontana to give you guys a decent shot at signing up. That means we have a 34 race season starting with Las Vegas on March 1.

To make things simpler this year with respect to driver swapping, part-time teams, and road-course ringers, you now effectively hire a team, and score points for anyone who drives for them. So say you hire the #09 team, who have three drivers scheduled to race in various events, you would receive points scored by all three while they were driving the #09. It’s kind of similar to the Martin/Almirola situation in the #8 last year. Also many of the cheaper teams are only part-time, or are uncertain pending sponsorship, so it would pay to check if they are going to show up before you hire them!

You can hire up to 4 teams to drive for you, provided that their combined salary comes in below the $2,000,000 Salary Cap.
Here is how much they cost:

$1,600,000
#18 (Ky.Busch)
#48 (Johnson)
#99 (Edwards)

$1,400,000
#11 (Hamlin)
#14 (Stewart)
#16 (Biffle)
#17 (Kenseth)
#24 (J.Gordon)
#29 (Harvick)
#31 (Burton)
#33 (Bowyer)
#88 (Earnhardt)

$1,200,000
#1 (Truex)
#2 (Ku.Busch)
#5 (Martin)
#6 (Ragan)
#9 (Kahne)
#20 (Logano)
#26 (McMurray)
#39 (Newman)
#42 (Montoya)
#83 (Vickers)

$1,000,000
#00 (Reutimann)
#07 (Mears)
#19 (Sadler)
#44 (Allmendinger)
#82 (Speed)
#96 (B.Labonte)
#98 (Menard)

$800,000
#7 (R.Gordon)
#12 (Stremme)
#43 (Sorenson)
#47 (Ambrose)
#55 (Waltrip)
#66 (T.Labonte / Blaney)
#77 (Hornish)

$600,000
#8 (Almirola)
#28 (Kvapil)
#34 (Andretti)
#78 (Smith)

$400,000
#09 (Keselowski / Marlin / Schrader)
#36 (Riggs)
#41 (Mayfield)

$200,000
#08 (Said)
#13 (Papis)
#21 (Elliott)
#23 (Skinner / Richardson)
#25 (Keselowski)
#27 (Shelmerdine)
#51 (Bires / Bean)
#64 (G.Bodine / T.Bodine / Gunselman)

$100,000
#15 (Davis)
#37 (Raines)
#46 (Long)
#57 (Benning)
#60 (Hylton)
#71 (M.Wallace)
#73 (Garvey)
#75 (Cope)
#87 (Nemechek)

Other Drivers
If any cars other than those listed above enter a race, they will be valued at $100,000.

You can have 7 driver changes over the whole season.

Keep track of your driver movements at Jayski's great site here: http://www.jayski.com/pages/2009teams.htm

Points:
Points are the same as the real series. Whatever a driver scores at each round in real life is what that driver will receive here, including penalties. The 'Chase' will not be used. If you notice that your team hasn't scored as many points as you think they should have (or more than they should have), let me know and I'll look into it.

Team Ownership, and you
- You don’t have to use all $2 million, but DO NOT GO OVER BUDGET!!! You will be disqualified from the round if I discover any creative bookkeeping.
- A driver can be chosen by more than one team - these guys are consummate professionals and are able to drive any amount of cars at once.
- Round results and championship standings will be posted here following the conclusion of each round. (if you hadn't noticed, alot of this is just copied from the V8 series, wonder if anyone will notice, just like this I'm writing) (yes Stu, I noticed )
- After the results have been posted, you can write press releases on your team’s performance (or lack of). Show us how good you are at distributing propaganda.


Team Announcements

Once you’ve picked your driving line-up, give your team a name, announce some sponsors, racing numbers, liveries, grid girls (pictures please! ), mascots, overseas technical partners and any other stuff you can think of, and of course your manufacturer of choice (though your manufacturer doesn't affect you points), then post here giving a detailed description of the copious quantities of hide your team will kick in the forthcoming season.

To make it easy for me, could you please condense the propaganda into this sort of form following your press release:

NAME: Five Into Four Racing
SPONSOR(S): UPS, 3M, DeWalt, Crown Royal, Aflac
DRIVERS:
#1 David Ragan (#6 team)
#2 Greg Biffle (#16 team)
#3 Matt Kenseth (#17 team)
#4 Carl Edwards (#99 team)
MANUFACTURER: Ford

(your choice of car numbers and Manufacturer doesn't actually affect anything, is just for fun, and people can make up their own liveries based upon that)


Posting Images and Liveries

Half of the fun of this is creating and posting your own liveries. While everybody likes to show infinite detail at super-high-resolution, not everybody’s screen can take it. While I can handle going over 400x400 (given there are warnings about large images), it's a bit rough posting images wider than a regular screen. 800x600 is probably the largest you should go.

I know there are some real good livery makers here, so get into it!

Other
For those of you not so knowledgeable about NASCAR, in the Nextel Cup series, only the top 35 cars in owner (not driver) points is guaranteed a starting stop in the field of 43, the 7 fastest of the rest get in, often there is more than 43 cars competing to even get into the race, hence driver values for drivers in cars out of the top 35 may seem a little low. Rookies and new teams especially will have a hard time, also the top 35 from 2007 is locked in for the first 5 races of 2008.

So get your entries in people, you can change your team as many times as you like until Las Vegas (ie before Friday 27 February), if you enter later than that you'll just score from the first round that you start. (schedule here: http://www.nascar.com/races/cup/2009/data/schedule.html)

Any questions/issues etc post here or PM me or Axeman. Until we hear from Stuie, Axeman will be running the show (assuming he can understand my spreadsheet ), so probably best to pester him!


Good luck!
Stu (and Antro and Axeman on his behalf)